Indeed, the government would not be able to produce any of the major economic indices that move markets every month, said multiple statistics experts, who were aghast at the proposal.

"They simply wouldn't exist. We won't have an unemployment rate," said Ken Prewitt, the former director of the U.S. Census who is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University.

"I don't know how the market reacts if there is suddenly no unemployment rate at the start of the month," Prewitt said. "How does the market react if we don't have a GDP [gross domestic product]?"

"Do they understand that these data that the Census Bureau collects are fundamental to everything else that's done?" asked Maurine Haver, founder of business research firm Haver Analytics and a past president of the National Association for Business Economics. "They think the country doesn't need to know how many people are unemployed, either?"

"Independent observers had a hard time wrapping their minds around the legislation."

"It's hard to take this seriously because they're really saying also they don't want GDP. They want no facts about what's going on in the U.S. economy," said Haver. "It's so fundamental to a free society that we have this kind of information, I can't fathom where they're coming from. I really can't."

"It's so unimaginable. It would be like saying we don't need policemen anymore, we don't need firemen anymore," said Prewitt. "To say suddenly we don't need statistical information about the American economy, or American society, or American demography, or American trade, or whatever -- it's an Alice in Wonderland moment."

"Just as the House effort to stop the ACS went nowhere in the Senate last year, the current bill looks similarly likely to die there."

But supporters of the Census Bureau and of government-backed science are acutely aware that pieces of such measures have a way of getting attached to higher-priority legislation. In March, a measure from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that bars the National Science Foundation from doing political science research this year slid through the Senate attached to legislation to keep the government running.

And Duncan's bill comes as Congress has already proposed slashing the Census budget 13 percent below the president's request, and the bureau lacks a director to complain. There is also no secretary or deputy secretary at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau and would generally advocate its cause in Congress.

"In what’s becoming a biennial tradition, another House Republican wants to cut the Census down to size. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) is rolling out the Census Reform Act this week, having formally introduced it April 18."

"It’s hard to overstate the loss of knowledge that this bill would bring about."

FORTUNE -- Bummed out by the latest unemployment or GDP report? Don't worry, Congress wants to help you out. Not by adding jobs or increasing productivity, but by eliminating the government surveys that help calculate such statistics in the first place.